I was skin and bones for most of my childhood.  My brother and I did nothing but play in our backyard almost year-round.   We had some video games, but our usage of them was pretty limited.  When I was 8 years old, my dad passed away.  He may have been a few pounds overweight, but was he by NO means obese.  His heart attack was brought on by a combination of bad diet and stress.  I was tested, and my cholesterol level was through the roof.  My brother and I were put onto strict diets in order to get the cholesterol levels back to normal.

When everything returned to normal, so did my eating habits.  I started packing on a few extra pounds over the years throughout elementary and middle school, but I wasn’t obese.  When I entered High School, I was probably about 160 lbs, though I was still growing at the time.  I was active.  My brother and I would spend night and day outside, either riding our bikes or just running around the backyard.  My bike was definately my main form of exercise, as I would ride everywhere.  The grocery, the mall, pretty much anywhere I wanted to go was a short bike ride away.  In 1991, I was a freshman in high school.  My mom and stepdad decided it was time for us to join the computer revolution, and we got our Packard Bell 386/16.  I’d wanted a computer for years, and now that I had one, it was like a whole new world opening up.  That was solidified when I moved from gaming to going online.  I came home everyday and spent hours just chatting with friends, reading message boards, and playing online games.  Slowly the weight began to pile on, but school and especially doing drill pracitce in ROTC helped keep the weight at bay.  By the time I graduated in 1994, I was about 180 lbs.

I spent the next three years in college and working in a grocery store.  Finally working and earning my own money allowed me to choose more unhealthy menu choices.  Even though I was keeping active at work and walking around campus, I still managed to creep up to 200.  In 1997, I was hired to my first computer job.  No longer required to stand or even move, my weight level began to make leaps and bounds.  Adding to the fact that I was now making more than I’d ever made, my diet got worse and worse.  In less than 1 year, I gained almost 30 lbs.  By the time I left New Orleans to move to St. Louis in 1999, I weighed 275 lbs.

Living on my own in St. Louis, I made a point to eat healthier to try to get my weight under control.  I still had some fast food and pizza, but for the most part, I cooked at home.  My main meals were grilled chicken, burgers, veggies, jambalaya, and occasionally some rice-a-roni or pasta-roni.  I maintained that level weight for quite some time.  I met my ex-wife, and during the time we were together, I tried several diets over the years, most with limited or no success.
When she and I finally divorced, I threw myself into my meals.  It was the one place of comfort I know I could find.  So I ate… and ate.. and ate.  I’d easily spend 2000 calories on a single meal.  I was in a tailspin, and the scale just kept going up and up.  Finally, in June of 2008, I weighed myself and I was almost to 330 lbs.  I was sick of myself and the weight I was at.  I wanted a change, though I knew to start the diet and stick with it, it was going to be a long and difficult road.

I decided the only way to guarentee my success was to tell the world.  Let everyone know what I was eating, and how it was effecting me.  I started the blog on June 30th, 2008.   The rest of the story… is in the blog.